Bob Marley, birthed as Robert Nesta Marley OM (February 6, 1945 – May 11, 1981) was a Jamaican singer, composer, and musician. His musical career was distinguished by merging elements of reggae, ska, and rocksteady, as well as his distinctive voice and compositional approach. He is regarded as one of the pioneers of reggae.
What are some of Bob Marley’s top musics?
Below are some of Bob Marley
1. “Get Up, Stand Up” — ‘Burnin’ ‘ (1973)
“Get Up, Stand Up” is possibly the most powerful song ever written about human rights and the fight to protect them. Marley and Peter Tosh frequently disagreed about the Wailers’ music (for example, how many Tosh songs should be included on their albums), but the co-written “Get Up, Stand Up” was an example of two minds thinking as one. Marley had visited Haiti and witnessed the country’s poverty firsthand, and Tosh was also sensitive to injustice, particularly in the music industry. “I am doing something,” he went on to say, “because I see the exploitation.”
2. “No Woman, No Cry” — ‘Live!’ (1975)
It’s unusual for a live recording to become the definitive one. However, this high-definition performance from London’s Lyceum Theatre in July 1975, shot by the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio, takes Marley’s epic reggae-blues ballad from 1974’s Natty Dread to church and beyond.
Marley is claimed to have composed it on a plane flight from Jamaica to London, and he attributed credit to Vincent ‘Tartar’ Ford, a buddy who fed Marley in his public kitchen ‘in the government yard in Trench Town’ when Marley was a destitute youngster. The specifics of Marley’s struggle became a universal plea, invoking “good friends we lost along the way” over an evocative melody.
The more uptempo Natty Dread version was enjoyable, but it paled in comparison to the version heard on Live!. Few pop moments are as spine-tingling as the introduction, in which the audience screams the chorus over billowing organ and harmonies from the I-Threes (the vocal trio that included Marley’s wife, Rita) before Marley has even sung a note. According to Aston B arrett, “everyone onstage [got] high from the feedback of the people.”
3. “Redemption Song” — ‘Uprising’ (1980)
Marley laboured on this simple, spiritual acoustic folk ballad for over a year, near the end of his life, when he frequently slept only three hours a night. (“Sleep is an escape for fools,” he declared. “I must be about me father’s business.” ) He kept it to himself when previewing Uprising tunes for Island Records boss Chris Blackwell in 1980, who subsequently pushed him for additional music. The next day, Marley played him a song that wasn’t even reggae music, but seemed to elegiacally sum up everything the vocalist represented.
Its verses felt positively biblical, and lines like “emancipate yourself from mental slavery” (a direct Garvey lift) and “how long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look” would soon carry a worldwide moral weight to trump national anthems. “I carried ‘Redemption Song’ with me to every meeting I had with a politician, prime minister, or president,” Bono remarked of his own global advocacy. “It was for me a prophetic utterance.”
4. “Trench Town Rock” — Non-Album Single (1971)
“One good thing about music,” Marley asserts in one of his most memorable statements, “when it hits yuh, y’feel no pain.” Despite being self-produced by the Wailers, this track has the imprint of Lee “Scratch” Perry, with whom the group was collaborating at the time. It was launched on the band’s Tuff Gong label in 1971, and its sinewy groove ruled Jamaica for much of that year. It debuted Marley’s characteristic ‘chick-ee’ guitar line, which would go on to define the reggae sound.
Its verses felt positively biblical, and lines like “emancipate yourself from mental slavery” (a direct Garvey lift) and “how long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look” would soon carry a worldwide moral weight to trump national anthems. “I carried ‘Redemption Song’ with me to every meeting I had with a politician, prime minister, or president,” Bono remarked of his own global advocacy. “It was for me a prophetic utterance.”
5. “I Shot the Sheriff” — ‘Burnin’ ‘ (1973)
“I Shot the Sheriff,” one of Marley’s best-known songs, was made famous by Eric Clapton’s popular 1974 rendition. “Some of it is true, some of it isn’t, but I’m not gonna tell you which,” he said. Esther Anderson, an actress, documentary filmmaker, and former Island Records employee, claimed that Marley penned the song after discovering she was on birth control – he thought the pills were wicked, and the doctor who provided the pills was the “sheriff.” Marley himself described it as a “diplomatic statement.
That’s not a sheriff; it’s just the ingredients of evil. People have been passing judgement on you, and you can’t take it any longer, so you burst. Clapton approached me about the song since they didn’t know what it meant when Clapton finished it.” Its commercial success boosted Marley’s image as an outlaw. “This delighted him enormously,” Rita Marley wrote. “He was happy to be known as ‘the musical revolutionist,’ fighting war with his music.”
Source: www.ghgossip.com
